Progressive Views on the News

Menu

Don’t Be Fooled

Up on Mineral Spring Avenue there’s a big billboard for a doctor’s practice with a photo of five guys in lab coats (the doctors). In the bottom left corner is a little slogan– ‘Don’t be fooled by others’.

This intrigues me. Who’s out there fooling patients? Are there offices around with guys in lab coats that don’t have MD’s? It’s vaguely unsettling, like the slogan, ‘there’s one near you’. One what, you wonder?

Anyway, it reminds me of the old joke about the businessman who put up a big ad– ‘Why go elsewhere and get cheated? Come to us instead.’

While I was typing this post, the TV was playing a commercial for…let’s call it Bear Aspirin. A woman was saying she got chest pain and her daughter gave her a Bear Aspirin which saved her life. I’d better run out and buy some Bear, because all I have at home is generic, and the genericness of it would surely cause me to fall down dead, stiffening before I even hit the ground, if I ever tried to use it for a heart attack.

Nancy-Bear aspirin?And you a nurse,shame,shame-D- in spelling.
BTW I use the generic.
That sign sounds vaguely unsettling.What kind of medicine do they practice?
I once busted a clinic in Chicago that actually had two fake doctors who were also illegal aliens.One from Italy,who had actually graduated medical school,then gone to law school and practiced law in Italy.The other was a Pakistani with a HS diploma from Karachi.She didn’t know what erythromycin was.
They both worked for a real(at least technically)doctor who owned two clinics.He worked at the oother one and signed hundreds of blank scrips for use in the one I busted.
The State of Illinois didn’t see fit to either prosecute him or suspend his license-since hiring illegal aliens wasn’t illegal(around 1978)we could only arrest the two “doctors”.
He continued his practice unhindered.And you wonder why I have an attitude.If some of the know it alls here had ever had to deal with such crap,they’d get it.

Kiersten-I really can’t say definitively why Illinois didn’t prosecute or discipline him.I was informed by a pretty reliable source that it involved a certain type of non monetary influence,but there was no way to prove it.We ARE talking about Chicago here-makes RI look like a T-Ball league when it comes to corruption and political influence.
BTW later on the Illinois Department of Mental Hygiene was later found to have had over 50 doctors on its mental hospital staff who were not licensed to practice.All were foreign nationals.Crazy.It was maybe a 4 days news story.As I recall INS had other things going on and didn’t even check the status of the individuals.At the time I had moved on to the Anti Smuggling Unit and was pretty constantly occupied with that assignment.Crazy world.At least I didn’t get bored at work.